Lots has been said about 2018 already and what an amazing and at the same time dramatic year it has been. Personally, I will never forget *that* simultaneous landing of the two Falcon Heavy side boosters (followed by watching Spaceman circle the planet live on YT for a few hours).While in a decade or two we might actually send people to Mars, there is something much bigger unfolding right in front of our eyes, right here and now.

No-one said it would be easy. But did it have to be this hard? At least it’s hard AND fun at the same time.Here are the seven lessons of building optimisation that we learned during the years since the founding of Fabriq - so you don't have to!

Photo by Bernd Sieker, CC BY-SAAs interest in distributed renewable generation and home energy system intensifies, it is useful to understand the underlying economics of such systems. Although there are many configurations for home energy systems, we have looked at a system including photovoltaic power generation, battery energy storage, electric vehicles and a control system with moderate load control. We are not including energy efficiency in the system evaluation, as many core energy efficiency measures are economically positive and should be implemented before installing home generation and power storage. This provides a better underlying demand that avoids installing excess generation and storage than if energy saving measures are implemented later. However, some load control and demand response is included that allows improved matching of the home power demand and supply.The return on home energy systems varies significantly based on location, as local consumption patterns, driving culture and renewable resource have large impacts on the economics of the system. In this analysis, public incentives (including subsidies, rebates or tax benefits) are explicitly excluded to allow evaluation of the underlying economics and comparison across markets.

Following part 1 and part 2, I received the official assessment a while back. Here is a quick analysis of the content and subsequent research on my part. Basic Numbers The Green Deal assessment I received is a 5 page PDF document. The very first thing that it tells me is that my current situation could be worse: So my household consumes less than the typical household. This is probably due to my habits rather than the building being energy efficient: I am out during the day, I tend to switch lights off when I'm not in a room and will put a fleece on when it's a bit chilly rather than switch on the heating. The side effect of this, as the rest of the document attests, is that my saving potential is lower than average.

In the first installement of this series, I detailed what the Green Deal was about and how I went about arranging an assessment, which is the first step in getting anything done. I had the assessment last week so it's now time to report back on how it went. Price and Output As detailed in my previous post, it took five calls before I reached someone who really knew what I wanted and could organise an assessment. Or so I thought. The second company on my list did call me back eventually, at which point I had to tell them that because they had called me two weeks after I had sent a request, I had already booked with someone else.

EnergyDeck recently introduced degree days into their system. You may be wondering what they are and what they're for. My name is Martin Bromley, and I'm from www.degreedays.net - a popular source of degree days for locations worldwide, and the source that EnergyDeck is using. I've got to know the EnergyDeck folks as they've been integrating with our system, and I was honoured when they asked me to write about degree days as a guest post on their blog. Degree days are a specialist kind of weather data that is used to account for the effect of the weather on energy consumption.

I live in a mid-terrace house that was built early in the 20th Century using solid brick construction. It's one of those typical suburban houses with nice bay windows and a small gas fireplace in the lounge, the sort you find all over the UK. Like most houses of this type, it is draughty, badly insulated and very inefficient in its energy use. I am starting a project to fix that and I would like to have the primary improvement works done under the Green Deal. The Green Deal is a new initiative by the UK government that became effective at the end of January and that aims to reduce the number of buildings that require high energy spendings in order to operate. It is designed so that it can benefit landlords and tenants alike, as well as owner occupiers. The primary way in which it does this is through easy financing that is linked to the property rather than the owner or occupier: the idea is that once the works are done, the energy bills of the property will go down. So the loan that finances the project is repaid against savings on the electricity bill. If the property is sold, the remainder of the loan is sold with it and keeps being applied to the electricity bills of that property. This has a number of advantages for tenants and landlords: An initial survey of the property is done by an accredited assessor who will identify what are the most cost effective measures for that property based on its characteristics and the way the people live in it, There is no upfront cost apart from the cost of the initial assessment, As the loan is made against the property rather than a person, there are no credit checks, which makes the finance and the whole scheme much more accessible to people who typically find it difficult to obtain credit, such as people who are self-employed or have bad credit history, You can receive cashback repayments against particular measures, You can have additional works that are not covered by the Green Deal carried out at the same time, as long as you finance them separately.